“All good things must come to an end.”
Reports say the Rachel Maddow’s new contract will end her daily show. She will stay with MSNBC doing something. You can’t blame her. She has headlined the show since 2008. Certainly the end of an era.
I won’t be missing her constant smugness.
Well… you could stop watching it now. 
Just sayin’.
About her network, in reference to a FAIR study:
Yeah, Maddow was the epitome of “right message but wrong messenger.” She said plenty of right things - factual, serious things; issues that needed addressing - but that cocky smirk and smarmy tone was too overwhelming and distracted from the point of it.
Did you notice the March 1, 2018 dateline on that opinion column?
Rachel Maddow certainly has put in her time as a five-day-a-week anchor / commentator. She started in 2005 at Air America radio, doing two hour slots, a gig she kept for the better part of two years at the same time as the MSNBC show when it launched in '08.
(Trivia question: on her radio show, she always said near the beginning, “We start today as we always do on the Rachel Maddow show with…” what? Anyone?)
So, she’s paid her dues. I will look forward to whatever projects she comes up with. Her podcast last year, Bagman, about Spiro Agnew’s corrupt vice-presidency, was superior in its storytelling and I learned much I didn’t know even as it was happening.
I’m not always happy with her long-winded windups, where she refuses to get to the point - it happened again yesterday, when I knew the news about Texas’ assault on Roe v Wade could be good or bad, and Rachel spent at least 15 minutes on the history of attempts to gut it before dropping the other shoe (it’s bad) - really, would it have hurt to drop that shoe first and then remind us of how we got here, important as that story is? This isn’t a detective story, where you don’t want to spoil the ending.
Also, there’s a tendency to try to milk every scandal dry, as if any tiny revelation is worthy of saturation coverage. I’m thinking of week after painful week of Bridgegate, the now mostly forgotten Chris Christie bombshell that was mostly a fizzle, which Rachel (and, to be fair, everyone else at MSNBC) acted as if it was the only thing happening in the world for weeks on end.
But - Rachel Maddow (and her staff) always do their homework, ask the right questions, try to dig out aspects of a story that others haven’t. She’s a great explainer, and a plain speaker who wants the audience to get the how and the why as much as the what. Smug? I don’t know where that’s coming from, but if the ability to communicate self-assurance equals smugness, I’m not sure that’s a deficit. She does treat the viewers as adults.
Just my opinion: I’ve always taken the smugness/smirk as just the way her mouth naturally contorts when she speaks.